“Crash! went the banquet table. Kimchi juice splashed all over the man’s pants. He ran outside—or maybe Big Sister told him to go, I can’t remember. When he was gone, I thought the worst was over. At last! I was starting to tell Big Sister about the new game that Oakja”—Oakja had been Emo’s best friend from childhood—“taught me. But Big Sister said, ‘Younghee-ah. Later, okay? I promise.” Younghee was Emo’s Korean name. “She turned to Father. ‘He’s asked me to marry him. And I’ve said yes.’ ‘Have you gone mad?!’ Father shouted back. ‘I’d rather you marry the worst beggar in Korea than that man.’ Big Sister said nothing. Father went on. ‘I bet even the worst beggar in America is better than that man. That man is the babo of all babos.’
“He kept trying to stop her. Told her this was her last chance. That if she stayed, he’d forgive her disobedience. And you know what she said to him?”
Eat well and live well, I thought. The same words Sang had once uttered to me.
But I was wrong. “She said, ‘I love you, Father. But I love him even more.’ Then Big Sister got up from the table and left.
“I ran after her. Told her she better stay, because we had to play that game like she promised. She lifted me up. ‘Younghee-ah, do you want to come live with us?’
“I shook my head. ‘Father thinks your friend’s a babo.’
“‘But your big sister loves him. Does that mean I’m a babo, too?’
“Jane-ah. I’ll never forget this. Big Sister gave me a big hug. But I was still pouting so I didn’t hug her back.
“‘As soon as we sort things out, I’ll come back for you,’ she told me. ‘And then you can teach me that game.’ But she never did.”
Emo’s last words hit me in the gut. Promise me we’ll listen to the new Evv-R-Blü album when I get back? I had never kept that promise to Devon.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it? If my mother had made the “right” choice and stayed, she would have been heartbroken. Instead she left, and it was Emo who suffered afterward. Someone was always losing out.
Later, after Emo had regained her composure, she would tell me other things. The details she’d pieced together through the years. For one: My father had come as part of some “government volunteer mission” promoting “peace and culture.” The Peace Corps? I’d asked, to which Emo nodded and said it sounded familiar. (Beth had done the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, right after college. She was continually on my case to apply, even though it would have put me two years out of the job market, with no new skills to add to my résumé.) Emo told me how my parents and I eventually set up house in Itaewon, where they could move about a little more freely than in the other, less “foreigner-friendly” neighborhoods. How they had traveled down again to the Jeolla countryside—“another volunteer trip—or so they claimed,” Emo said, with some consternation, as if alluding to something I didn’t understand—and it was there, in a cheap minbak inn, the kind heated with yeontan, coal briquettes, that carbon monoxide seeped into the room where my parents were sleeping. Both died in the middle of the night. I had been left in the care of friends in Seoul; had I accompanied them on the trip, I would have died, too.
For as long as I could remember, I had created a certain memory of my last night with my mother before she died. It was a constructed one, but still its images were etched into my brain. There was the cheap room with the hard earth floor, the thick blankets and mats redolent of spittle and warmth. Our last hours together. My mother swaddling me in those thick blankets to protect me from the gas that took her own life. I thought she’d given her life to spare mine, the way mothers in fairy tales died to save their children. But that’s not how it had happened at all.
I knew that Emo blamed my father for my mother’s death. She was performing backward induction, tracing the sequence of events that led to her death, and all those roads led to Currer Bell. If only he had never set his “insufferable” foot in this country. Who knew how far back Emo followed the thread of blame. For her the story, and that photo, changed nothing. Her Big Sister was dead, and That Man was the one responsible. But for me, for me!
“So . . . my father wasn’t a GI?”
“Is that all you care about?” Emo cried.
“Of course I care. This changes everything!” Was Emo so clueless? Who my father was changed what kind of person my mother had been. It wasn’t so much that I was the kid of a GI; it was that my mother hadn’t just been his one-night stand, the way everyone back in Flushing thought of her. She hadn’t been thrown away and left behind. She’s a fool if she thinks for a second that her American father wants to take her back. But this picture, too, revised my whole history—Sang had been wrong. I had been wanted. “Not fair, you keep something so big from me!”
Emo stared at her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry, Jane,” she said. “Your grandfather would get so angry if anyone mentioned your mother that I guess I got used to never talking about her. But that was wrong of me. And I only found that picture after your grandfather passed away. It was tucked inside some old files. But it still doesn’t change the fact that that man should’ve had the nunchi to leave our family alone.” Emo’s tone was suddenly petulant, like a child’s.
But soon it grew hazy, nostalgic. “And then—you came to me. After they died. You were my sister’s best parts. Whenever I held you in my arms and looked down at your little face, I could see only Big Sister.”
Emo reached for one of the other photos from the envelope—the one of the two girls. She gazed down at it tenderly.
“This was taken right before your mother left to start school in Seoul.” She held the picture of my mother up to my face. “This is your good half. Don’t ever forget it.”
That night, after my talk with Emo, I kept staring at the photos, trying to force a flood of infantile memories to rush over me. But they remained locked; the photos released not one shard of the past.
In the black-and-white, sepia-tinged picture of my mother and Emo, Emo wore a school uniform and looked no older than Devon. In her prepubescent years, Emo was painfully skinny and knock-kneed, and she gazed up at her older sister with adoration. Devon had looked up at me in the same, hopeful way, when she asked me to help her with the Hunter exam. I focused on my mother in the photo. She looked lanky and drawn—the skin was stretched taut over her pronounced cheekbones. She had the same haunted expression clouding her eyes that she’d had as a child.
I placed her image side by side with the photo of my father. Could I picture them as a pair? I squinted, comparing them to the distant, hazy faces I had created for them when I was a child. My father was pretty much consistent with the picture I’d long created for him. But my mother was different. I’d always imagined her as looking more coquettish, in a way that would have lured men. What happened to her laughing in a convertible, hair whipping across her face? Instead she seemed bookish, serious, and introspective.
Emo had said my mother stared up at my father during that Chuseok dinner as if she were grateful. Just as Nina had accused me of being with Changhoon. It was the same word that had echoed through all of my childhood in Flushing.
If I had stared into my mother’s face one year ago, I would have pronounced her handsome. Seeing her now, though, through my Seoul-adjusted gaze, I realized this: My mother would have been considered plain.
Chapter 22
High-Maintenance
I ended things with Changhoon. Reader, I wasn’t an idiot; I knew he was everything on paper. Marrying him would have been the responsible choice, providing the ultimate stamp of legitimacy for me in this not-quite motherland. I would finally shed my problematic American gyopo honhyol ways and, with Changhoon’s guidance, fully immerse myself in the waters of Korea-Korea. But you could list assets ad nauseam and still the balance sheet staring back at you would not change what your heart longed for you to do. You only doing what your heart wants, Sang had chastised me. He’d been right abou
t me after all.
When I broke the news to Changhoon, he told me I was just nervous, that it was perfectly normal to have cold feet. We were sitting on a bench on the banks of the Han River, and he was taking quick puffs from his cigarette. He said we should continue going ahead with it and that later, after the rush, we could sift through my confused emotions and make sense of them. As he spoke, I scratched my cheek; a film of foundation rolled under my fingernails.
But when Changhoon saw that I was resolute, he hunched over, his hands tapping together. He wouldn’t look at me. He sat like that, blinking. Composing himself. Finally he said in his deepest voice, “I know that my feelings are stronger than yours.” He took a long, deep pull of smoke. It swirled in his open mouth before a hopeful wisp streamed out. “But . . . couldn’t you just work on it? I’ll help you.”
I thought back on Changhoon’s “Development of Myself” chart. I thought of each of his elaborately constructed plans, our trip to Busan. Across the water, on the banks of the Han, there was a gap in the skyline, where a stretch of old buildings had just been razed. The city was dotted with cranes and scaffolds and stacks of building materials. All of Seoul under construction—a never-ending scramble to develop and redevelop itself.
With Changhoon I felt I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. Yet he’d continually reward me for behaving in ways that felt unnatural, so I kept working on the act. But I couldn’t force something that wasn’t there. There comes a time where you’ve just got to be who you want to be. His words were finding their way back to me.
“You deserve someone who’s all in,” I told him. I didn’t know if the words translated, but I know he understood.
Changhoon and I were over. Ever the gentleman, he insisted on driving me home. It was a slow, despondent drive, nothing like the thrill of rushing over the Brooklyn Bridge with Ed. I wondered what that view from the Promenade looked like now, without the towers. Their absence must have echoed all through that empty sky. As we crossed the Han, I took in the river’s stillness, this foreign expanse of water that should have felt like home—but never did.
* * *
When I returned to the apartment, Emo was sitting on the floor, back propped against the leather couch, watching television. She spotted my sullen face and jumped up. “Apologize immediately,” she said, before I even uttered a word. “It’s not too late to salvage things. If you don’t act now, you’ll lose your chance to secure your future forever!”
At first it sounded as if she were speaking the language of commerce, of infomercials. But her words were accompanied by an expression that looked utterly pained. “Do you want to be lonely for the rest of your life?”
“Emo, I broke his heart. But I don’t—I couldn’t—love him. . . .” I trailed off. I was losing confidence.
She pointed to the TV screen. It was a rerun of Don’t Throw Me Away and Leave Me. “You never finished watching it with me,” she said. “You were too busy going on dates with Changhoon.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She waved away my apology. “Only because you never learned how it ends.”
“What you talking about?” I said. “Eun rejects Jihae and marries Bora. The end.” The preview commercials for the finale had told me enough, without my actually having to watch it.
“But he only marries her because he thinks Jihae’s going to marry Chulsu. And Jihae only marries Chulsu because she thinks Eun’s marrying Bora. When they each find out what the other did, it’s too late. And the rest is trage— Wae wooruh?” she said sharply. “You’ll ruin your makeup.”
Emo was right. I shouldn’t be crying. I couldn’t stop them, though, the tears welling up in my eyes, threatening to smudge my mascara.
But there was a flicker across her face, her expression going gentle. “Who is your Eun?” she asked softly.
Ed and I used to sit around the kitchen table, eating his heroes and making stupid jokes long into the night. We spoke with an ease that never came naturally to Changhoon and me. It wasn’t just due to his poor English and my weak Korean.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand—makeup be damned—and whispered, “Ed Farley.” I wasn’t sure how Emo would react. She’d want a name like James Kim or John Hong. I remembered the way she’d referred to my father as “that man” and the scowl that had accompanied it. “This man,” she said. “Do you still love him?”
I nodded. “I think I still do.” I know I still do, I corrected silently.
“Does he love you back?”
“He did.” I paused. “I don’t know if he still does.”
“Then you have to go back and find out. Before it’s too late.”
I knew how much Emo understood longing. She could not get her sister back, but maybe I was the closest thing. What about all that Emo had said about guarding her heart?
“But, Emo—I would leave you.”
Her lower lip trembled. But she bit down and swallowed. She took in a deep breath and righted her face. “Do you want to end up like the people from Don’t Throw Me Away?”
Apparently Bora went mad and set the house on fire. Eun tried to save her, but she leaped to her death. He ended up maimed and blind. Jihae committed suicide, and Chulsu remarried. Then the network shut down the show.
She continued, in a bright voice, “What can I say? I’m a sucker for romance.” She put the photo back down on the table. Then she shot a fist into the air. Emo could have been Beth, rooting for local produce. “Ee Jane, fighting!”
It was time to come home.
* * *
I set about making arrangements for my return. I knew I should have looked for a corporate-finance position. But I was tired of doing all the things I should do. Once again I found myself on the job hunt. This time, though, I changed the focus of my résumé, playing up my small-business experience. Those jobs were there aplenty—if you knew to look for them—but they were overshadowed by their flashier big-bank counterparts. I applied for an analyst position at a family-run real-estate developer. I passed the initial phone interview and was asked to come in person. I set my return date to the States accordingly. It was probably not the most glamorous of jobs, but I was familiar with the work. I took a small pleasure in corralling details into place and trimming away inefficiencies.
After I gave my resignation at Zenith Academy, Monica said, “Must be so nice for you, sweeping in and out as you please.” She struggled to keep her voice light, but a note of resentment cracked through. I noticed her change in tone before I registered her switch to Korean.
“What’s your meaning?”
Monica began ticking off her fingers. “Looks. Boyfriend. Job. Whereas some of us have to work for the things we get. Or don’t get.” There was now no mistaking the bitterness steeping her words.
“You may think you know me,” I said tersely, switching into English, “but you don’t know the other half.”
“Oh, tap-tap-hae!” she cried. “You just don’t get it, do you? They just gave you that job because you’re the only native English speaker on staff. Principal Yoo thought it’d look good. You know”—she let out a little laugh—“for the image of the school.”
The words cut; they undermined the work I’d been proud of and cheapened it.
“Then maybe good for you I leave. Freeing up the budget. Maybe now you getting the promotion.”
“Wow, lucky me. I get your leftovers.”
Maybe Nina had been right after all about Monica. I was too stunned and angry in that moment to process entirely what was happening. But later, looking back on that final conversation with Monica, I realized she must have found me as insufferable as I had found Beth, perhaps as insufferable as Emo and my grandfather had found my father. All those times I’d offered my advice to her—Put your foot down or The squeakiest wheel gets the oil—when I myself didn’t have a clue about the system here. Maybe Monica longed to re
peat back the same words I’d used to explain to her the rules of English grammar: I don’t know why, it just is. No matter how hard we tried, neither of us would ever master how the other’s world worked.
* * *
I wrote to Nina. I told—spilled, like a gushing watermelon—about everything I hadn’t, or couldn’t, that last night in Seoul. I worked up the courage to e-mail Ed. “I’ll cut straight to the point,” I wrote. “I have not been able to stop thinking about you since the day I left New York.” It was a burden, I knew, to unload my feelings this way, but I ignored Sang’s words echoing in my head. I poured out my heart to Ed.
When I wrote to Beth, I told her that “I’m sorry” couldn’t even begin to explain—let alone excuse—what I’d done. “I did something very bad when you were away at that conference in California. But in truth my betrayal to you began long before that.” At a certain point, I didn’t even know what I was typing anymore. I just blurted out the whole truth. Then I hit SEND.
I wrote a censored version to Devon, explaining my hasty departure. I told her I was sorry for breaking my promise to return, but I hoped I could make it up to her back in New York.
I did one last thing before I left Korea. I ended up going back to Itaewon, even though I told myself I’d never return. You could say I was paying homage to the place where I was born—and borne from. But the real reason was for bootleg videos. I rescued the entire series of Don’t Throw Me Away and Leave Me on VHS from the bargain bin.
A few hours before I was to set off for Incheon Airport, Ed Farley wrote back. “Jane! Jane! Jane!” Nothing more. Hastily I fired back with my flight info. I am coming! Wait for me! I shouted in my head.
* * *
At the airport Emo handed me an envelope. Inside was the picture of my father and me. But she’d also included another photo—the one of her and my mother. When I tried to give it back to her—“Emo, this is all you have of her”—she pressed it into my hands.
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